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Spotify is writing enormous amounts of data onto my hard drive. As is expected from an app that downloads every song it plays and then deletes it after you close the app. All that reading and writing is wrecking havoc on my computer. I've had four disk checks on my hard drive already.

A few weeks back, I put Spotify's cache location into RAM (/dev/shm/). Now, the settings say the cache is in RAM but on checking, ram is a few kilobytes and the Spotify cache is back to it's usual gigabyte-range of data.

I've also tried creating a symlink between Spotify's cache directory and the RAM directory. That didn't work. Spotify destroyed it as soon as the app started. I'm thinking of writing a script and chrooting Spotify into RAM. I love Spotify but I could get the same service from Youtube without the constant wearing-down of my drives.

Do you guys have any suggestions?

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  • What do you mean by "I've had four disk checks on my hard drive already."?
    – heynnema
    Jun 12, 2017 at 16:55
  • On startup, my computer asks me to run fsck on the local disk drive.
    – KI4JGT
    Jun 12, 2017 at 17:31
  • I've added a partial answer for your fsck messages.
    – heynnema
    Jun 12, 2017 at 19:51

1 Answer 1

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Partial answer... work in progress...

Step #1:

To check the file system on your Ubuntu partition...

  • boot to the GRUB menu
  • choose Advanced Options
  • choose Recovery mode
  • choose Root access
  • at the # prompt, type sudo fsck -f /
  • repeat the fsck command if there were errors
  • type reboot

Step #2:

  • undo the changes that you tried to make to Spotify's cache to /dev/shm. I'm not sure if that's the right place to try and do that. The data file that it's writing is not that large, and if it deletes it on its own, then there's no worries.
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6
  • Counter to "there's no worries". SSD users have a very good reason to be worried if Spotify uses excessive writes.
    – Kaz Wolfe
    Jun 12, 2017 at 20:02
  • @KazWolfe is /dev/shm the correct place to move that cache file to RAM?
    – heynnema
    Jun 12, 2017 at 20:10
  • I'm not sure about the correct location, or even how to solve it. I'm just saying it can be a concern for SSD users.
    – Kaz Wolfe
    Jun 12, 2017 at 20:11
  • @KazWolfe OP indicates a hard drive.
    – heynnema
    Jun 12, 2017 at 20:13
  • I've followed these steps four times before asking this question. It only happens when I go on a Spotify binge. When I go to the cache folder, it's overflowing with data and /dev/shm was working for a long time. According to what I've read, it goes directly into RAM.
    – KI4JGT
    Jun 12, 2017 at 20:41

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